What is the Complexity of a Distributed System
Anand Ranganathan, Roy H. Campbell · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2005
Distributed systems are getting bigger and more complex. While the complexity of large-scale distributed systems has been acknowledged to be an important challenge, there has not been much work in defining or measuring system complexity. In order to defend against overwhelming system complexity, we need to be able to understand and measure complexity and then, attack the issues that cause complexity. In this paper, we define different aspects of system complexity and propose metrics for measuring these aspects. We also show how these aspects affect different kinds of people - viz. developers, administrators and end-users. Based on the aspects and metrics of complexity that we identify, we propose general guidelines that can help reduce the complexity of the system. Finally, we briefly describe how we have used some of these guidelines to reduce complexity in our middleware for autonomic ubiquitous computing environments.